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Errors in eyewitness accounts can occur when a witness comes into contact with post-event information. A common way to encounter this is for witnesses to discuss their memories with one another. The current research addresses this issue, by investigating 'memory conformity' between individuals who witness and then discuss a crime-event or pictures. For this research, a novel procedure was developed and employed whereby dyad members each encode a slightly different version of the same basic stimuli, which is then discussed prior to a free-recall test that is completed individually. Experiment 1 found a significant memory conformity effect between witnesses who had discussed an event prior to recall, in comparison to a control group with no discussion. At test, 71% of witnesses errantly reported at least one unseen detail that had been acquired during the co-witness discussion. No age-related differences in susceptibility to memory conformity were found between younger (18- 30 years) and older (60-80 years) adults. Experiment 2 found that misleading post-event information acquired during a discussion with a co-witness was a more powerful means of influencing memory reports than misleading narratives that are commonly employed in eyewitness research. This was true for both younger (17-33 years) and older (58-80 years) adults. Following these findings, Experiments 3, 4 and 5 investigated possible factors underlying memory conformity, as well as incorporating a source-monitoring test. Individual differences in personality and memory ability were not reliably associated with susceptibility to memory conformity. However, a consistent finding when analysing the co-witness discussions was a relationship between 'response order' and memory conformity. Specifically, the first witness to mention a critical (experimentally manipulated) detail that they had seen was the most influential dyad member, and the most resistant to influence, even when their memory was disputed by a co-witness. Applied and theoretical implications of the main findings are discussed.

A long standing debate surrounds the issue of whether there is overlap in the cognitive processing of language and music. This thesis examined the extent to which there are similarities in the immediate serial recall (ISR) of verbal and tonal pitch sequences using the working memory model as the empirical framework. The thesis had three aims. The first was to develop an ISR task that would allow individuals of any level of musical training to report back sequences of tones and letters. The second aim was to compare letter and tone sequence recall performance under various conditions known to affect ISR for auditory-verbal materials. The third aim was to examine performance as a function of musical expertise. Nine experiments were conducted in total. The first six experiments tested, refined and validated the new ISR tone paradigm. The final three experiments compared musicians and nonmusicians letter and tone sequence recall using manipulations known to affect ISR for auditory-verbal items; phonological similarity (pitch proximity used for tone recall), articulatory suppression and irrelevant sound. Similarities across the results included comparable sequence length effects for letter and tone conditions, an effect of pitch proximity and phonological similarity for nonmusicians, and effects of articulatory suppression on recall of both sequence types for both groups. However, there were also a number of differences in tone recall compared to letter recall including a lack of recency and no effect of irrelevant sound. Therefore, a complete theoretical overlap between language and music processing in short-term memory was not supported by the evidence. The problems of equivalent testing across the language and music domain, and across populations of varying musical expertise were discussed. It was suggested that increased understanding of how cognitive resources are shared to process language and music in the brain would come from future research combining behavioural experiments with functional models and neuroimaging studies.